Recognizing LGBTQ History: Experiences from the Lake Michigan Lakeshore Webinar Recording 04.11.2024

Historians, preservationists, activists, and the public at large have shown increasing interest in celebrating and sharing the history of LGBTQ people in recent years. The 2019 commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion in Greenwich Village led to a number of exhibitions and public history projects nationwide.
This presentation explores the work of one such effort at the Lake Michigan lakeshore. Saugatuck and Douglas are two of Michigan’s most popular Lake Michigan summer tourist destinations and residential centers for people interested in history and the arts. From its origins as a lumbering and shipbuilding community in the 1800s, the area has built a reputation as a “home for all” with a significant LGBTQ population. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, steamship and railroad travel made the Saugatuck area along the Lake Michigan shoreline a resort and arts destination with people coming from Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and across the region.
The history of queer people at the Lakeshore was not well documented or understood even as Saugatuck and Douglas were widely known as the “Fire Island of the Midwest” by the 1980s. This program will explore how the Saugatuck-Douglas History Center undertook a community-based effort to collect stories, archival materials, and artifacts to preserve LGBTQ history. It will also share specific themes of LGBTQ history including bars and restaurants, businesses, lodging, resorts, and entertainment venues within the historical contexts of social, cultural, legal, and political history relevant to history projects across the region.